# Morig: Motion-aware rigging of character meshes from point clouds

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.09463 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09463/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [4DComplete: Non-Rigid Motion Estimation Beyond the Observable Surface](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01905/) (2021)
- [Shape2Motion: Joint Analysis of Motion Parts and Attributes from 3D Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03911/) (2019)
- [Neural Deformation Graphs for Globally-consistent Non-rigid Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01451/) (2020)
- [Deep Part Induction from Articulated Object Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07417/) (2018)
- [Learning Skeletal Articulations with Neural Blend Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02451/) (2021)
- [MultiBodySync: Multi-Body Segmentation and Motion Estimation via 3D Scan Synchronization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06605/) (2021)
- [Predicting Animation Skeletons for 3D Articulated Models via Volumetric Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08506/) (2019)
- [RPM-Net: Recurrent Prediction of Motion and Parts from Point Cloud](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.14865/) (2020)
- [3D Rigid Motion Segmentation with Mixed and Unknown Number of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06087/) (2019)
- [Reconstructing Articulated Rigged Models from RGB-D Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.01371/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [MagicArticulate: Make Your 3D Models Articulation-Ready](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12135/) (2025)
- [Puppeteer: Rig and Animate Your 3D Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10898/) (2025)
- [As-Plausible-As-Possible: Plausibility-Aware Mesh Deformation Using 2D Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16739/) (2023)
- [iTACO: Interactable Digital Twins of Articulated Objects from Casually Captured RGBD Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08334/) (2025)
- [TapMo: Shape-aware Motion Generation of Skeleton-free Characters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12678/) (2023)
- [RigGS: Rigging of 3D Gaussians for Modeling Articulated Objects in Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16822/) (2025)
- [GEM3D: GEnerative Medial Abstractions for 3D Shape Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16994/) (2024)
- [Category-Agnostic Neural Object Rigging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20283/) (2025)
- [Explorable Mesh Deformation Subspaces from Unstructured Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07814/) (2023)
- [Skin Tokens: A Learned Compact Representation for Unified Autoregressive Rigging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04805/) (2026)
- [ARMO: Autoregressive Rigging for Multi-Category Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20663/) (2025)
- [AniGen: Unified S3 Fields for Animatable 3D Asset Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08746/) (2026)
- [ASMR: Adaptive Skeleton-Mesh Rigging and Skinning via 2D Generative Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13579/) (2025)
- [SPRig: Self-Supervised Pose-Invariant Rigging from Mesh Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12740/) (2026)
- [ViP-Rig: Visual-Prompted Controllable Rigging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.27982/) (2026)
- [GaussiAnimate: Rig Animatable Categories with Level of Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08547/) (2026)
- [Rigel3D: Rig-aware Latents for Animation-Ready 3D Asset Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13129/) (2026)
- [RigPAPR: Rig-Based Animation of Static Neural Point Clouds from a Fixed-Viewpoint Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06685/) (2026)
- [BLARM: Animating 3D Objects from Video via Blending Latent Rigid Motion Primitives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.31113/) (2026)
- [Branch-Centric Tokenization and Test-Time Augmentation for Skeleton Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.06218/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present MoRig, a method that automatically rigs character meshes driven by single-view point cloud streams capturing the motion of performing characters. Our method is also able to animate the 3D meshes according to the captured point cloud motion. MoRig's neural network encodes motion cues from the point clouds into features that are informative about the articulated parts of the performing character. These motion-aware features guide the inference of an appropriate skeletal rig for the input mesh, which is then animated based on the point cloud motion. Our method can rig and animate diverse characters, including humanoids, quadrupeds, and toys with varying articulation. It accounts for occluded regions in the point clouds and mismatches in the part proportions between the input mesh and captured character. Compared to other rigging approaches that ignore motion cues, MoRig produces more accurate rigs, well-suited for re-targeting motion from captured characters.